Future of Human Civilization Vol. 1

Author:

Baofu, Peter

Year:

1999

Pages:

416

ISBN:

0-7734-7945-7978-0-7734-7945-6

Price:

$259.95

This wide-ranging book focuses on why the global spread of formal rationality contributes to a critical spirit which undermines human values and beliefs (including the scientific ones themselves), be they ancient, medieval, modern and now postmodern. This is so in special relation to the model presented here of the seven major dimensions of human existence: the True (knowledge), the Holy (religion), the Good (morals), the Just (justice), the Everyday (consumeristic culture), the Technological (technophilic culture), and the Beautiful (arts and literature). This not only has happened in the Western world, but is spreading to the civilizations of the non-West as well. When carried to its logical conclusion, this undermining will yield what the author refers to as the post-human consciousness after postmodernity, in that humans are nothing in the end, to be someday superseded by post-humans.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents (main headings)
Introduction - A Beginning Thought: New God, Old Solace, and Modernity
1. Modernity and Its Trinity
2. The Consumeristic and Technophilic Lifeform, and Its Price
3. No Objectivity, Nor God, and the Critical Spirit of Science
4. The Ideal of Aesthetic Autonomy, and Its Disillusion
5. Moral Universalism and Localism for a Just Society, and Their Incredibility
6. Four Global Modern Legacies to Postmodernity
Conclusion – A Final Thought: No God, Nor Solace, and After